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This Elibron Classics title is a reprint of the original edition published by the Theosophical Publishing Society in London, 1899.
Annie Besant was a prominent British socialist, Theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator and supporter of Irish and Indian self-rule. In 1890 Besant met Helena Blavatsky and over the next few years her interest in Theosophy grew while her interest in secular matters waned. She became a member of the Society and a highly successful lecturer in Theosophy. As part of her Theosophy-related work, she travelled to India where in 1898 she helped establish the Central Hindu College, and in 1902 she established the first overseas Lodge of the International Order of Co-Freemasonry, Le Droit Humain in England. Over the next few years she established lodges in many parts of the British Empire. In 1907 she became President of the Theosophical Society. This volume include the following writings: Thought-Forms The Case For India My Path To Atheism Death—And After? The Christian Creed, Or, What It Is Blasphemy To Deny The Basis Of Morality Evolution Of Life And Form London Lectures Of 1907 Avatâras Esoteric Christianity - Or The Lesser Mysteries. An Introduction To Yoga Karma
Out of the darkness, through the open window of Birth, the life of a man comes to the earth; it dwells for a while before our eyes; into the darkness, through the open window of Death, it vanishes out of our sight. And man has questioned ever of Religion, Whence comes it? Whither goes it? And the answers have varied with the faiths. Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and as the snake from its skin, the butterfly from its chrysalis emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of consciousness. Now it is the fact that this escape from the body, and this dwelling of the conscious entity either in the vehicle called the body of desire, the kâmic or astral body, or in a yet more ethereal Thought Body, can be effected during earth-life; so that man may become familiar with the excarnated condition, and it may lose for him all the terrors that encircle the unknown. He can know himself as a conscious entity in either of these vehicles, and so prove to his own satisfaction that "life" does not depend on his functioning through the physical body. Why should a man who has thus repeatedly "shed" his lower bodies, and has found the process result, not in unconsciousness, but in a vastly extended freedom and vividness of life why should he fear the final casting away of his fetters, and the freeing of his Immortal Self from what he realises as the prison of the flesh?
In her long life, Annie Besant embraced political, religious, and social causes with equal conviction and sincerity, courting ridicule and controversy by actively promoting unpopular ideas. At 26 she fled the shelter of marriage to an Anglican clergyman and renounced her religious upbringing by joining the National Secular Society. Under the influence of its president, Charles Bradlaugh, she wrote and lectured for the cause of Freethought, and in 1876, achieved nationwide fame by defending birth control in a public court. She converted to socialism and through her friendship with Bernard Shaw joined the Fabian Society. In 1888 Besant played a leading role in the Bryant and May match girls' strike and became Secretary of the trade union they founded. But by 1891 she had fallen out of sympathy with socialists and turned instead to Theosophy and its eccentric prophet, Madame Blavatsky. Thereafter she divided her life between England and the Theosophical Society's headquarters in India. She joined the Indian National Congress and was interned in 1917 for her passionate advocacy of Home Rule. In this, the first full-length biography of Annie Besant in thirty years, Taylor draws on previously unpublished letters to show that Besant was in love, not with Shaw, but with journalist W. Stead who rejected her advances. The book reveals for the first time the full extent of the Government of India's alarm at Besant's commanding position in the crisis of 1917, and her bid for political and religious power in India.